Not So Very Different
by ClockworkSky
Summary: A Slave. A Queen. Two paths that seem so very different The night she stayed in the Skywalker household as a fourteenyearold queen, Padmé has a conversation with Shmi Skywalker that would stay somewhere in her mind for the rest of her life. Perhaps she an


**Not So Very Different **

**By: Bethany A. **

**(LotusFlowerPadmé/BohemianNeko/AmayaNightReign – all are aliases of me.)**

Rated: G

Pairing/Ship: Anakin Skywalker/ Padmé Amidala

Time frame: Mostly a flashback from AOTC to TPM. The flashback is italicized.

Summary: A Slave. A Queen. Two paths that seem so very different The night she stayed in the Skywalker household as a fourteen-year-old queen, Padmé has a conversation with Shmi Skywalker that would stay somewhere in her mind for the rest of her life. Perhaps she and the slave-woman from Tatooine weren't truly very different at all...

While waiting on Anakin to return from his trek to find Shmi Padmé remembers the first day she knew the Skywalkers.

Padmé walked quietly through the Lars household, the side of her index finger gently pressed against her lower lip. She paced back and forth, her thoughts racing across the past several days. She looked around for anything to busy her mind; giving 3PO an oil bath had provided a brief distraction but not one deep enough to pull her mind back from the desert of Tatooine, from the foreboding horizon that had seemed to engulf Anakin in a wave of his black cape. She continued to pace back and forth through the house until she walked past the living room where Owen Lars slept, Beru taking his bed. There was an extra bed in another room of the house and he could have slept there but had, in spite of her protest, insisted that Padmé take it. If only he'd known how little she'd actually be sleeping. She smiled slightly and even that seemed to be an effort. She walked again past the couch but this time walked to the kitchen where she found a cup and filled it with water. She took it and found her way back to the same chair in which she had been seated earlier that day. She took one drink of the water and set it down on the table, her mind drifting even further into the past. She looked outside, toward the Lars' garage, running her finger along her cup's rim, paying as little attention to it as what she was actually looking at.

Her mind seemed to tumble down, deeper and deeper into the past as she looked out over the yellow and orange, back to a day on the same planet but very far away, a little more than ten years ago. Cool, almost chilling air, blew into the house from outside, casting her even deeper into her reverie as she remembered how relieved she'd been when night fell on her first day on Tatooine.

She remembered sitting at the table in Shmi Skywalker's kitchen, almost as silently and still as she sat at the Lars' table now. And she remembered echoes… she remembered voices…

"…_Ani, let me clean this cut."_

"_There's so many. Do they all have a system of planets?"_

"_Most of them." _

"_Has anyone been to 'em all?"_

"_Hm, not likely."_

"_I wanna be the first one to see 'em all."_

_Padmé was startled as she heard Shmi walk into the room and to the other end of it. She no longer heard the voices of the man and the boy who were sitting just outside the door, but rather the voice of the graceful woman that stood before her. Padmé followed her movements with her deep hazel eyes. _

"_Ani, bedtime," Shmi called to her son as she wiped a long streak of oil from the wall that had most likely gotten there due to her son's fascination with building things. She crossed the room again, flashing a small, benevolent smile at Padmé as she walked past toward the door. "Ani," she called again, her tone a bit more urgent but nonetheless patient, "I'm not going to tell you again." _

_After a moment the boy appeared through the doorway. _

_Anakin stopped at the table, looking at Padmé and smiling briefly as he took a piece of orange fruit from the bowl on the table. Padmé smiled back briefly and spoke to him quietly as he bit into it, "Ani, you'd better do as your mother says, you need sleep."_

_Shmi picked something up out of the floor, tidying her humble home, before walking over to her son and running her fingers through his thick, dark blonde hair. "Yes, you need sleep far more than you need something else to eat." She smiled as she stroked the side of his face, "Tsk, I don't know where you keep it all." She bent a bit and kissed his temple, "Take your food and go get ready for bed." _

_Anakin frowned slightly and looked at Padmé, "She gets to stay up." _

_Padmé pressed her lips together tightly to hold back a laugh, a small one escaping anyway. _

"_Yes, but she is older than you are, not a growing boy, and our guest. Now off to bed." _

"_But-"_

_Padmé saw Shmi's patience begin to waver and felt her diplomatic drive kick in, though she'd tried to keep from participating where it was not her place to, "I'm not the one on whom everything depends, what you're going to do tomorrow is important, and you want to do your best don't you?." _

"_Yes," Anakin replied, almost sullenly, not liking losing this argument at all. Especially not to a girl, however much like an angel he thought her to be. _

_She looked up and smiled at Shmi a bit before looking back at Anakin's dark blue eyes, "And don't worry, your mother and I promise not to have too much fun without you. We'll go to bed soon too." She stood and straightened her clothes a bit. _

_Anakin crossed his arms, "All right." _

_Shmi squeezed her son's shoulder just before he pulled away and turned around and nearly disappeared into the very short hallway. Just as his small frame disappeared Shmi looked at Padmé and smiled more warmly than before. "Tha-"_

_Padmé glanced toward the doorway as she saw movement. Shmi saw it too. _

_Anakin leaned just around the corner and said almost urgently, "Oh, goodnight Padmé." _

_Padmé couldn't help but allow there to be a slightly amused little groan in her voice as she replied. "Goodnight, Anakin."_

_Shmi laughed and though she smiled at her son her voice was more stern than it had been before, "Now to bed." _

_Anakin almost ran away, him saying "'Night, Mom," being almost lost in his quick movement. _

_Shmi looked at Padmé once again and sighed heavily, her relief that she'd finally gotten her son to bed showing in the way her shoulders visibly dropped, though they hadn't really appeared tense before. "Now, as I was saying, thank you." She looked back at the door before brushing moving past Padmé, beginning to wash supper's dishes. Padmé, without any further thought, moved in beside Shmi and began to take the dishes from the stack the woman had made and to wash them in the basin of nearly hot water, ignoring the fact that it was uncomfortable. _

_Shmi pursed her lips together a bit as she looked at Padmé's hands. The girl seemed to know what she was doing but the condition of her hands told Shmi that this girl had not seen the life she had, the life her son had, and for that she was glad. Though she envied Padmé's freedom, more for her son than for herself, she was relieved for the girl, that her beauty had not been marred by years of work and callusing sand. "You don't need to do that, dear," Shmi told her, in much the same tone that she spoke to her son. _

_Padmé looked over at her and smiled, taking another dish in her hand, "I want to. You've earned far more help than I can give you, but I can try." _

_Shmi didn't know what to say, kindness had been something she'd known very little of in her life. "Thank you," she said quietly after a hesitant pause.  
_

_Padmé smiled wider, this time without looking up from her work. "Besides, it's not very often that anyone allows me to do these kinds of things," she paused, realizing that even if Shmi knew that she was the true Queen of Naboo that it wouldn't matter, but still choosing to try to be discreet, never wanting to flaunt her power or position, especially not to this woman or to her son, "Working in matters of state, even in a small capacity, doesn't allow much room for 'normal' life. Manual labor is so foreign to me that I actually enjoy it… it feels… freeing." _

_Shmi was silent for a few moments until Padmé glanced at her, biting her lip very slightly, wondering if she'd said something wrong. _

_Shmi realized that in her thoughts she might have put the girl ill at ease and said what she'd been thinking. "In truth, I find it freeing to… doing things like this… in _my_ home, for my son, are the only sense of freedom I've ever known," she paused and looked at Padmé, then past her, "Other than-" then she stopped. _

"_Other than what?" Padmé urged softly, reassuringly. _

_Shmi looked back at Padmé, looking her squarely in the eye, her face seeming even more at peace and serene than it had before, though Padmé was unsure of how that was possible. Shmi's eyes looked as deep as oceans to Padmé, though the thought of what filled those oceans, years of pain and suffering, struggling to give her son a better life than she'd even known but with no real means to do so, a deep yearning for something unattainable, a yearning for being able to change things that could never be, seeing what was in those oceans pained Padmé and made her want to look away but she didn't, for at the same time Shmi's eyes were more content in that moment than Padmé had, until that point, ever seen anyone's be. _

"_Other than the freedom I see in Ani-," she paused and smirked a bit, "Anakin's eyes. Jira's always said that he had my eyes."_

_Padmé started to agree with Jira, though the woman was not there, but Shmi continued, not noticing Padmé's lips part to speak as she was drying a dish. _

"_But I don't think so. His eyes- his eyes are like nothing I've ever known. They may _look_ similar to mine but- his eyes are something all their own. They're anything but like mine- he sees the universe in a way that I could have never imagined 'til he spoke to me for the first time, 'til the first time I saw his crying eyes as he was placed in my arms. And though I still don't understand where he gets his tenacity, that will that goes on forever, that hope that never shows any sign of extinguishing, or even diminishing, when I look into his eyes I feel it. I could never have it myself, if I ever had it this universe has stripped it away from me, so very long ago that I don't remember, but I hope that _nothing_ ever takes it away from him. When I was very young I longed for escape, for freedom from the clutches of slavery, but now… I am free. Though there are plenty of reasons I'd like to leave this planet, leave all of the difficult work behind, I don't long for it anymore. The very first time I saw the face of that little boy sleeping in there, I was free. No bonds matter to me now… no forced obligation or duty truly matters to me, but neither does it bother me to fulfill them, for all that matters to me is the life, the happiness of my little boy. That is my happiness; that is my life; that is _my_ freedom. His eyes changed me… and I don't think for a moment that that's all they'll change." _

_Padmé had become lost in Shmi's words, and only after a long moment of silence did she realize that her hands were almost rigid, still just beneath the water in the basin. She opened her mouth once to speak but for some reason no words would come. Her mind was whirling too fast for her mouth to keep up. _

_Shmi noticed this reaction and laughed as she gently nudged Padmé away from the sink and finished washing the last several dishes, "I wonder if every mother has the same reaction to her children's eyes." _

_Padmé finally came to herself and took a towel and began drying the clean dishes, stacking them neatly together, each with something very similar to it, allowing Shmi to put them in the appropriate place in the cupboard. "I- think I might. I'm… not sure." _

_Shmi smiled again as she stood up, taking the last small stack of dishes from Padmé and putting them away. "I'm sorry for going on like this."_

"_No, it's… no trouble. I want to listen." _

_Shmi smiled and reached out and stroked the side of Padmé's face with her thumb. Padmé closed her eyes briefly, not having felt so at home since she'd been a small girl in her own parents' house. When Shmi put her hand down she placed it on Padmé's shoulder rather than completely pulling it away. "My son trusts you, you've already proven a very good friend to him, and an even greater friend to me." She laughed and spoke a bit playfully, "Anakin adores the ground you walk on, I trust you not to abuse that?"_

_Padmé laughed, smiling widely, "I'll certainly try not to." _

_Shmi stroked down Padmé's braided hair, "The universe needs more people like you, and more people like Ani. If there were more people like you then no one would ever lack for kindness." _

"_Ms. Skywalker… I-"_

"_No. 'Shmi', for one I've come to love as dearly as I have you in these few short hours Shmi is the only name that's appropriate, dear girl."_

"_S-Shmi- I… thank you. That's the most…wonderful compliment anyone's ever given me." Padmé glanced back toward the doors that led to where Anakin was sleeping. "And about Anakin- I think I agree with you. He is very kind and… does seem the type to change things." _

_Shmi sighed as she moved away, finishing up putting things away and turning out the lights, "If only he could get far away from here." _

_Padmé looked down at the table, "Maybe- Master Qui-Gon… could help him."_

"_Indeed I hope he can." _

_Padmé stifled a yawn. _

"_It's very late, you should get some rest," Shmi told her, in her consistently mothering tone. _

_Padmé rubbed her eyes, "You should too." She sat down on a bench, covered with a thin pillow. _

"_You can have my bed," Shmi volunteered quickly, taking Padmé gently by the wrist to lead her. _

"_But what about you?"_

_Shmi smiled and looked toward the bedrooms. "I'll sleep with my Ani…" her voice changed slightly, seeming scared or sad, "I have a feeling that things are going to change greatly tomorrow… for better or for worse." _

_Padmé agreed, seeing that the woman wanted to sleep next to her young son, and allowed Shmi to lead her to a bed. Padmé walked to the washroom after taking the outer tunic of her outfit off, rubbing some cool water on her face before she slept. Before returning to the room in which she was to sleep she looked through the doorway of another room, and saw the moonlit figures of a woman gently stroking her beloved son's hair as he breathed deeply in and out, far away, and free in his dreams. _

_When Padmé returned to the bed she sat down on it and stared at the wall for a moment, thinking about all Shmi had said. She was all the more convinced that fighting for justice in the galaxy was worth any sacrifice she must make. Cool night wind blew through a window, causing Padmé to chill as it ran across the cool water on her face, but soon the cold liquid was contrasted by a single hot trail that ran down her cheek, all the things Shmi hoped for, Padmé realized that she hoped for too, far more than she ever had before. _

The wind howled as it rounded a corner against the Lars' homestead, Padmé suddenly remembering the present. She felt her eyelids drooping, though her mind was just as keen as ever. She stifled a yawn and walked to her bedroom, deciding that while her body would allow her to that she had better get some sleep, for this night, like that night all those years ago, held the promise of change… for better… or for worse.

The next morning as the twin suns rose over Tatooine Padmé clinched her eyelids once but after that brief indulgence in sleep she sat bolt upright, a feeling of fear seeming to creep closer and closer to her, the fact that Shmi could be dead seeming far more likely than it had even the night before, in spite of Anakin's conviction, his feeling, when he'd left that she was alive.

And now with the memories of the day she'd met Shmi so fresh on her mind, the thought of losing her, pained her more deeply than it ever had; for herself and for Anakin.

Not long after she'd awakened she heard 3PO's voice from outside shout, "Master Anakin's back!"

3PO sounded worried, as he had ever since Shmi's disappearance, spare a few instances, but being a druid he could not possibly understand the gravity of the situation.

She, Owen, Cliegg and Beru all met Anakin and Padmé felt her heart sink as she recognized what she saw. Anakin had returned… with Shmi's body. It was wrapped in a makeshift burial shroud, as carefully put together as any machine Anakin had ever built, he'd obviously wrapped her with great care but the caring little boy that Padmé often still saw in Anakin's eyes, across his face, was nowhere to be found in that moment. He took his mother, holding her reverentially, and carried her down into the house, without sparing a word. He looked at Cliegg, he looked at Owen and at Beru, but he did not look at her. This did not bother Padmé, she was not thinking about herself at all, but rather about the mother whom she'd seen stroking her son's hair as he slept on Tatooine, of the tortured young man that walked into the Lars' house before her… of one of her dearest memories fading to only the possibility of being just that- a memory.

There were so many things she wished she could tell Shmi, and she wished there were anything that came to mind to tell Anakin. She felt tears well behind her eyes but she closed them tightly, pressing them far back, far back into her mind and heart, and only thought of Shmi's words while she was living.

"_I still don't understand where he gets his tenacity, that will that goes on forever, that hope that never shows any sign of extinguishing, or even diminishing, when I look into his eyes I feel it… I hope that _nothing_ ever takes it away from him."_

But Padmé knew that now it was far too late for that. That little boy had been broken by life in the same way that Shmi had, in perhaps an even greater capacity, and Padmé now only wondered if for Shmi that she could find a way to give that hope back to him. As she recalled everything Shmi had said to her that night she realized that Anakin's eyes meant very much the same thing to her as they did to Shmi- that though very different that her love for Anakin was just as important to her as Shmi's for him had been, as important as breath, and more important than anything else. More important than even political obligation she then began to realize, and began to feel stupid for ever having thought that her duty to a vast impersonal body that was the Republic superceded her duty to a living, breathing man, a boy, whom she'd come to love long before any of this ever mattered, and grew to love more every day.

Later, when Padmé held Anakin tightly as they sat in the floor of the Lars' garage, as Anakin's anger quieted, fading away to a blood red gash in the very depths of his soul, making him feel as small as a grain of sand, making him despise himself as much as he hated the sand, he found himself listening to Padmé's calming whispers, and more than that listening, feeling, her thoughts.

Finally when the tears stopped she started to pull away. Before thinking it through he spoke, "Stay."

Padmé stopped mid-motion and held him just as tightly as she had before as he remained in the same position, his eyes still wet with tears though they'd stopped flowing.

Padmé heard a voice in her head, this time just her own voice, _'I'll always stay with you…'_ as she remembered Shmi's words.

"_My son trusts you…"_

Padmé found a small smile through his tears, though Padmé didn't see it, as he was connected so intricately with her thoughts, though she didn't know it at the time. He smiled a bit because there was something that Padmé didn't know, that his mother didn't know. That night he'd sat just within the doorway, listening, quietly listening. He'd heard every word… And now the thing he was the most grateful for was that he had not, in fact, been asleep as his mother ran her fingers through his hair. Aside from the final goodbye that was the last time he could remember what his mother felt like when she was well… the last time he could remember feeling her touch when it wasn't growing cold. Padmé might not have known that he was listening that night, but she yet could. His mother would never know. In spite of his fighting he felt the tears come back, but Padmé held him relentlessly, much the way his mother had all those years ago.

Padmé nuzzled her face against Anakin, inhaling deeply, his smell curling through her mind and deep into her memory as she shed the only tears she ever allowed herself to shed for Shmi. And in that moment, she promised Anakin, promised herself, and most of all promised Shmi, that she would take care of Anakin… that she would never leave him alone. His mother had left him because she'd had to… and though Padmé wished she could see Shmi again, hug the woman whom she'd grown to love in so short a time, she knew she could show the woman who'd shown her so much kindness in exchange for so little kindness throughout her own life, one more act of kindness…

And Padmé hoped that if one could know of the living after death that Shmi was aware of the fact that her son would always be taken care of… the best Padmé knew how. She would save them. Save that little boy from Tatooine whose mother had loved him so very much…

_And what neither Padmé nor Shmi knew was that Anakin had been hiding just around the corner of the doorway, listening to every word. And what Anakin did not know was that in years to come that the words of Padmé and his mother's conversation would reverberate through his mind, and find a way to comfort him even when all seemed smoldering ash… It was, at times, in that memory that he found the strength to revive that thread of hope that his mother had hoped so fervently would never break. _

And as Padmé looked at Anakin, having just become his wife, she held both his hands tightly for a moment, looking into his eyes and seeing all that his mother had seen and, she thought, far more. And it was in that brief moment that she finally, after years of slow progress, realized that she and Shmi Skywalker had not been so very different.

* * *

Completed: Monday, July 31, 2006 

4:49 AM EST on a night upon which I could not, for the life of me, sleep.

Livejournal username: penname: Amayanightreign

AIM/Most other things: LotusFlowerPadme


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